


Bleed After Bleed

by icedteainthebag



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-30
Updated: 2008-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:13:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icedteainthebag/pseuds/icedteainthebag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully deals with the progression of her cancer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleed After Bleed

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [](http://xf-santa.livejournal.com/profile)[**xf_santa**](http://xf-santa.livejournal.com/) as a gift for [](http://turynn.livejournal.com/profile)[**turynn**](http://turynn.livejournal.com/). This fic takes place right before Demons and ends before Zero Sum. The timeline is all screwed up around here (thanks, CC), but just consider it April 1997.

She doesn't want him to see her. The last time he saw her nose bleed in the field, he'd stared at her like he'd seen concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life. She'd stood there, gun drawn at the head of Kurt Crawford, and fleeting anger had swept over her. She could feel the blood warm under her nose but she still stood her ground, unwavering, defiant, even to Mulder's concern. She needed to be in control.

 _It will not control me_ , she told herself then, she told herself for weeks on end, over and over, bleed after bleed. _It will not control me_.

And now her body is fighting with her again as she sits in the passenger seat of his car, waiting for him to return on a colder-than-normal April night, the late evening casting a hazy mist over a dark street perforated with vacant lighting.

They never hurt when they happen--they are stealth in their arrival and in their intentions. The blood comes and goes, seemingly without explanation, though she knows there is always an explanation. _There's always an explanation_ , she tells herself.

She used to keep a list of occurrences--location, time, temperature, apparent humidity--until he found her list one day and handed it to her. "Scully," he'd said, and before she could digest the depth of the concern in those two syllables, she'd taken it and turned her back on him. She'd walked away from him and dropped it in the waste receptacle outside of the parking garage elevator. She'd stopped making lists then.

She plunks open the glove compartment where he always keeps extra napkins, and each time she accesses them among crumpled oil change receipts and insurance paperwork she convinces herself that he keeps them there for himself, not for her. That when she leaves the car, he doesn't wonder why they seem to run out more quickly these days. That he replaces them for his own needs, not hers.

She pulls a napkin out and shuts the compartment door firmly.

She tilts her head forward and pinches the fleshy skin of her nose anterior to her frontal sinus, closing her eyes, feeling her blood trickle out. She visualizes it spreading along the fibers of the napkin. It moves so swiftly, so easily, and soon her loss is a red Rorschach on pressed white 100% recycled paper.

 _The common nosebleed, epistaxis, with peak incidence in those under ten or over fifty, is often the result of facial trauma causing the rupture of a blood vessel within the nasal mucosa_ \--these facts read in her mind in black and white, like the page of an encyclopedia from her father's den, from the hundreds of pages of research she read about nosebleeds and tumors back when cancer was just a word she heard around her, but never directed at her. Back when she stood--afraid, but afraid to admit it--as her blood dripped into the swirling clear water of her porcelain sink.

It had finally stopped, and the first thing she did after cleaning up her face was devour everything she could find on the subject, bundling up in a warm blanket on her couch, laptop glowing eerie blue as she patiently pursued her fate.

This is a short bleed, the bleed in the car tonight. She's thankful it stopped so quickly. She flips down the mirror and looks at her face, blotting, wiping, normalizing. She licks her finger and mixes remnants of blood with saliva on her upper lip and wipes it up. She crumples the napkin and pops it into her now-empty venti coffee cup, snapping the lid snugly in place, reminding herself to take it with her when he drops her off that night.

He arrives back at the car. "Long line for the bathroom," he says. "Did I miss anything?"

She shakes her head, glancing at him, glancing forward. "I'm just tired. Ready to go home."

He keeps looking at her and she tries to ignore his gaze. "Is everything all right?"

She stares out the windshield. She is frozen. She wants to be frozen to him for some reason she can't explain. So many years of wanting to feel closer to him, wanting to share things with him, to find meanings and truths with him, and now all she wants to do is block him out, to push him away.

"Mulder, I'm fine."

She knows that he knows the conversation has ended before it's even begun.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

He saves her, she saves him.

He saves her, she saves him.

It's been nearly ritualistic, their back-and-forth rescues, as they've clung to each other throughout his self-imposed madness of a life. She's followed him despite everything, dusted off after every fall, headstrong and willing to join him as he ventures into the darkness over and over again.

It's been a week since her last nosebleed.

This latest disturbance she pulled him out of nearly cost both of them their lives. She had flinched at the flash of his gun aimed at her as he cowered in dark shadows. She'd calmly stood in front of him, her breath erratic, composed by means of pondering in all honesty if she would rather die by his gun or by the cancer pressing into her brain.

Flip of the coin.

The gunshots were deafening. They had rung in her head like broken church bells, hollow and empty, and she'd closed her eyes after the first crack, waiting, giving in. She'd wondered what it would feel like to die, if lead projectiles ripping through her organs would feel like the furious fire she felt burning inside when she'd seen her tumor for the first time.

She'd opened her eyes to silence. He'd shot the wall behind her.

She'd curled herself over his body, protecting him as he shook.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

They're sitting on his couch in the early evening, dust dancing through the end of daylight that dares to enter his apartment. They're sitting close, legs barely touching. There's an energy between them she's felt since she first saw him and it's humming now. She doesn't try to explain it. It's just there, always has been, always will be.

She hasn't been to work in two days, instead falling into a pattern of bleeding, cleaning up, curling up in bed. Bleeding, cleaning, curling. He'd called her seven times and she didn't answer six of them.

"I'm coming over," he'd said on the seventh.

"Don't," she'd halfheartedly warned, her voice stuffy, the phone on her ear. Her body was lost in the down of her comforter, her pillowcase dotted red, her cheek pressed against the soft crinkle of tissue.

"Scully, I'm worried about you." He didn't have to say it. It was obvious in his inflection.

"Mulder..." She'd rolled onto her back, the tang of blood still sickly evident in the back of her throat. "I'm fine. I'll come over to your place."

"No, Scull--"

"I'll be there in an hour."

She'd hung up and dragged herself out of bed. She'd doused herself in hot water and steam filled her lungs. Her ears plugged with her index fingers, she'd listened to the patter of the shower against her scalp, an echo of a torrential rainstorm in her head.

She'd wiped her mirror free of steam and looked at her face. It looked too normal, like nothing had changed, yet her world was spinning with change. She was nearly dizzy with it all.

She even felt it on his couch now, that spinning, and she used to think it was beautiful and good, used to look forward to it and the hope it used to bring. She dreaded nothing more lately than that incessant, driving motion around her.

"Scully, I think you need to face what's really going on here." He's got his elbows on his knees and he's bent over his thoughts.

"I don't know what you mean." She knows. She also knows that he'll call her bluff.

He looks over at her and she shifts on the couch. He pushes off his knees with a sigh and a roll of his head on his shoulders. "I won't let myself be in denial any more. I won't let you be in denial either."

Her lips part and he waits for her to speak. "Mulder, I'm not in denial."

He puts his hand on her arm. She twitches instinctively, caught off guard. She feels the churning storm on the horizon. She's not sure if she wants to face it head-on. She's not sure she can.

"Listen to me," he says, his command sounding less forceful than he most likely intended. It has the same effect on her regardless, and she is a deer in headlights, turning her face to him slowly, as if in a dream. He takes a breath and she watches his expression as he steadies himself in preparation for his words.

"I'm not going to stand around and watch you destroy yourself because you won't come to terms with the fact that this cancer can't be rationalized, that we don't know why it's been given to you, that you can't control it."

His fingers tense on her arm as he speaks. She listens to him, staring into his eyes. She detects his desperation. He doesn't just want her to listen. He wants her to agree, to do what he says. She wants to argue with him, yell at him, scream at him, but she feels the fight has been drained from her over the past two days. The feeling is rare and disturbing, an emptiness in her gut, an ache in her head.

She listens to him.

"You can't control it. You'll spend every waking hour trying and you can't. It's getting worse, Scully. Don't lie to me and say it's not."

"I won't." She bites her lower lip, taking her time to form words around the thought that's been flying its final, circular approach in her head for weeks. She doesn't want to land that thought, because in speaking it she would acknowledge its existence. But now she feels like she has to do it, at least for his sake. He needs to know. "It's getting worse, Mulder."

She watches his expression change before her eyes. It hurts him to hear it. She knew it would. But he needs to know. It hurts her too, to hear her voice saying those words that she has steadfastly refused to believe for weeks. He reaches over and pushes her hair behind her ear, looking intently into her eyes.

"You need to go to the hospital. I want them to run more tests."

She exhales sharply and turns away from him. She scans the coffee table in front of them, an organized mess of his life and her life haphazardly strewn across dusty beechwood. "Mulder, I know what's wrong with me and I know what's happening. What else is there to know?"

She stares at the red and white cover of a file, someone's lost cause, peeking out from under a dinner plate. She can feel his eyes traveling over her. She hears him breathe.

"How quickly time is slipping away from you. From us."

Her stomach twists almost as sharply as her head. Their eyes meet.

"Mulder, don't say such things."

He sighs and drums his fingers against his thigh. She sees them out of the corner of her eye as they tap out a distress signal. His head nods slightly, the nod he does when he's thinking. "Scully, I…I have to cope with this somehow. I'm trying. But I can't stop thinking that every day that passes, time's moving faster toward some sort of end that I'm not ready to face."

There's a wavering in his voice for a moment. They are so close. She leans in slightly, her breath quickening, fluttering inside. She can feel his breath on her lips, but he is still.

"Everything dies, Mulder," she whispers, the only thing she can think of, the first thing she heard on her first day of med school. _Everything dies. Everything dies._

He closes his eyes and brushes his lips against hers.

She feels alive, a spark in the night.  



End file.
